The Cognition of Positive Psychology

On one Sunday, I was viewing on the web, the video of Harvard University public class, positive psychology, which was taught by Tal Ben Shahar attracted me deeply, it has total twenty-three classes, and I finished watching it in four weeks and benefit a lot from it. I would like to share it with others who have no idea about it.

An insightful article by Carey Goldberg for The Boston Globe in 2006, noted that 855 students enrolled for Dr BenShahar’s positive psychology course in Harvard University which possessed more students than the traditional business and economics classes. It is a recent branch of psychology whose purpose was summed up in 1998 by Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

There were ten Happiness Tips from Harvard’s verysought-after lecturer Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar:

1. Become conscious of things that make you happy

Think of experiences, not things. It is not a million dollars that will make you happy. It is the opportunity to spend more time with your family, to travel around the world, to gain financial stability. But Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, suggest that we start with the smaller blessings.

2. Combine pleasure and meaning

What Ben-Shahar suggests is that we do not have to choose one extreme or the other. We can find something that is both tasty (satisfying) and healthy (meaningful) in the long run.

3. Do not make happiness your ultimate goal

You will not be happy if you do something or have something, because happiness is not the end state. It is something that we continuously have to work towards for as long as we live.

4. Create rituals

Your happiness ritual maybe you love taking a long stroll after dinner, or singing in the shower, or meditating for 15 minutes.

5. Imagine being 110 years old

Looking back at your life what advice would you give to your younger self? What is the most important lesson of all? What trivial, negative, superficial things are not worth your time and effort? When you look at your everyday life from this perspective many things fall into place.

6. Simplify your life

Commit to decreasing the busy-ness in your life by liberating more time for goals or activities that increase your happiness. Ask yourself, what you can give up or say “no”to? Free your mind from emotional clutter. Simplify your daily routines.

7. Remember about the mind-body connection

If you want to keep your mind positive and your spirits up, start with getting an adequate amount of sleep, paying attention to your diet and getting regular exercise. Take care of your body!

8. Embrace your emotions unhappiness.

Not just positive emotions as joy or enthusiasm, but emotions like anger, fear, anxiety or sadness. Do not try to deny or run from them. Expecting to be happy all the time is unrealistic and ultimately impossible. Doing so will only lead to disappointment and greater unhappiness.

9. Start with your attitude

Extreme scenarios aside, our happiness is mostly determined by what we choose to focus on and how we decide to interpret external events. If we focus on something that angers, annoys or frustrates us, we will feed this emotion and subconsciously look for other triggers that will make us even angrier and even more frustrated.

10. Make happiness your ultimate currency

It is happiness, not money, connections or social status that should be the currency by which our life ought to be measured. If our days feel meaningless and empty, the question we should ask ourselves is – What are we trading our happiness for? The answer to this holds the key to our life satisfaction and self-development.

As a conclusion, Positive psychology seeks "to find and nurture genius and talent", and "to make normal life more fulfilling", not simply to treat mental illness. The field is intended to complement, not to replace traditional psychology. It does not seek to deny the importance of studying how things go wrong, but rather to emphasize the importance of using the scientific method to determine how things go right.

（作者单位：石家庄市第一中学）